The poet who could smell vowels
From The Times Literary Supplement
Ferdinand
de Saussure, the father of structuralism, owed much to
Hobbes and Mill, and numbered Henry VII among his
ancestors
John E. Joseph
As he lay dying, in 1913, of arteriosclerosis and
influenza, still a lethal combination today, Ferdinand de
Saussure must have been sure that, come the year 2007, no
one would mark the centenary of his first course on
general linguistics at the University of Geneva or the
sesquicentenary of his birth, on November 26. His name,
never widely known, was forgotten except among the few
scholars who recalled his impressive Master’s thesis
of thirty-four years earlier.
All this depressed him. A modest, even-tempered man,
at the age of fifty-five he harboured no deep bitterness,
yet the one thing that consistently upset him was being
denied his due. On a visit, in 1911, to his sister
Albertine, at Mettingham Castle in Suffolk, her husband,
Major Hastings Ross-Johnson, raised a sceptical eyebrow
at Ferdinand’s claim to descent from English
nobility. In good aristocratic form, Saussure disguised
his dismay, but as soon as he returned to Geneva he
started writing to cousins for information that would
confirm the lineage.
With the help of Burke’s Peerage, he traced his
direct line of descent from King Henry VII, via Princess
Mary, the sister and co-heir of Henry VIII, to the
Egerton family, Earls of Bridgewater. Saussure’s
maternal grandfather, Charles-William Saladin de Crans,
was the son of Elizabeth Egerton, and Burke’s
Peerage confirmed Saladin’s right to quarter the
royal crest in his coat of arms. As Ross-Johnson scanned
the family tree which his brother-in-law drew up and sent
to him, his eyebrow descended again. Your wife and I, it
informed him, are pedigreed descendants of William the
Conqueror, whereas you, Major, bear the name of one of
his battlefields. Game, set and match.
When a letter from Albertine mentioned that she was
planning to send her son to a public school, Saussure
urged her to reconsider. As a boy of ten, he had himself
gone to a Swiss boarding school run on the British model,
and had terrible memories of what the older boys had put
him through. He was pulled out in the middle of a term on
account of what his father, not usually a reticent man,
referred to in his diary only as “deplorable
things”. Years later, Saussure claimed a special
insight into the English mentality, which, predictably in
the circumstances, did not always manifest itself as
sympathy. His private writings show him to have been
deeply upset at British policies in South Africa in the
run-up to the Boer War, though this did not stop him from
investing money in British companies there.
None of this information has been published before. It
has come to light in papers discovered in 1996, only a
very few of which have made their way into print. The
Writings in General Linguistics, first published by
Gallimard in 2002 (English translation from Oxford
University Press, 2006), consists mainly of texts already
published in 1974 or earlier. The new material in
Writings, including the brief fragments found in twelve
envelopes marked “On the double essence” or
“On the essence”, does not differ on any
essential point from the previously known manuscripts.
Saussure was consistent in his conception of language
throughout his life.
More revealing is the personal information in the
papers. His claims to Englishness are surprising because
he seems so archetypically Continental, standing as he
does at the head of all the structuralism and
poststructuralism that followed in his wake. Yet Geneva,
the city of Calvin and Frankenstein (for whom
Ferdinand’s great-grandfather Horace-Bénédict de
Saussure may have been a model), was described in 1814 by
the historian and political economist J. C. Simonde de
Sismondi as “a sort of British city on the continent
. . . a city where people think and feel in English,
though they speak and write in French”.
Saussure’s most characteristic ideas have British or
American sources, including the most distinctively
Saussurean idea of all:
"In a language there are only differences without
positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the
signifier, the language contains neither ideas nor sounds
that pre-exist the linguistic system, but only conceptual
differences and phonic differences issuing from this
system." (From the posthumous Course in General
Linguistics, 1916.)
Where the irregular, turbulent form of
human thought (A) is mapped onto the irregular, turbulent
form of human sound (B) and meaning (or content) is
thereby drawn into being through the interconnections,
themselves another form of form.
The terms “signifier” and
“signified” were not introduced until one of
his last general linguistics lectures in 1911. But the
idea of a psychological sound pattern corresponding to a
spoken word, functioning purely through its difference
from every other such signifier, is found in his notes as
far back as 1881, when he was in Paris working towards a
French doctorate that he never completed.
“Language”, he wrote at that time, in a
manuscript now in Harvard’s Houghton Library and
published in 1995, “is composed of a system of
acoustic oppositions.” Acoustic only: no indication
as yet that the conceptual side, the signified, is
similarly oppositional in its nature – that it too
has no positive content, just a value generated by its
difference from other signifieds, as claimed in the quote
from the Course.
This remains vividly controversial, as I was reminded
some months back when I was drawn into an e-conversation
with a philosopher of language who is convinced that the
meanings of words must have some primordial reality that
is not simply differential, and blames Saussure for
introducing a fundamental error. Yet, in philosophy
itself, and in sciences other than linguistics (because
linguists just did not think about such things), it was a
commonplace view in the second half of the nineteenth
century that all thought and all consciousness was purely
differential and negative in nature. It was a defining
feature of British psychology, as opposed to Continental
(particularly German) psychology, which, before the
British approach made inroads into it, took thought to be
made up of ideas, maybe innate, maybe acquired, but with
real, substantive content.
For the late nineteenth century the locus classicus of
differentiality was John Stuart Mill’s Examination
of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865), a
scathing attack that brought far more attention to
Hamilton’s writings than their author had managed
during his lifetime. Hamilton’s “relativity of
human knowledge” was one of the few things Mill
agreed with, summarizing it as follows:
"We only know anything by knowing it as
distinguished from something else; all consciousness is
of difference; two objects are the smallest number
required to constitute consciousness; a thing is only
seen to be what it is by contrast with what it is
not."
“With this doctrine”, wrote Mill, “I
have no quarrel.” Since Hamilton nowhere states it
so succinctly or clearly, one can hardly begrudge Mill
his co-ownership of it.
Saussure had come into contact with the English and
Scottish philosophical traditions in his teens, reading
Pictet’s survey of them in his book on aesthetics,
Du Beau. That background left him receptive to the
Hamilton–Mill doctrine when he was introduced to it,
at the start of the 1890s, via his younger brother. After
completing a degree at the École Polytechnique in Paris,
René de Saussure had gone to the United States hoping to
start an academic career. Not finding himself in demand,
he worked as an architect and wrote papers on
bidimensional geometry, a field straddling the border of
geometry and physics. He would send these papers to
Ferdinand, who critiqued them (sometimes to his
brother’s irritation) and arranged for their
publication in Genevan scientific journals. (The most
important of René’s manuscripts, together with his
letters to his brother, are among the Saussure papers to
have come to light in recent years.)
The main source of René’s inspiration –
indeed the sole source cited in one of his papers –
was The Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics (1882) by
John Bernhard Stallo, German-born but from the age of
sixteen a resident of Cincinnati, Ohio. René’s
papers include very full résumés of Stallo and lengthy
citations, ensuring that Ferdinand knew its contents,
whether or not he read the book or its French
translation. Among the many passages of interest to him
is this one:
"Thought, in its most comprehensive sense, is the
establishment or recognition of relations between
phenomena. Foremost among these relations – the
foundation, in fact, of all others, such as those of
exclusion and inclusion, coexistence and sequence, cause
and effect, means and end – are the relations of
identity and difference. The difference between phenomena
is a primary datum of sensation. The very act of
sensation is based upon it. It is one of the many acute
observations of Hobbes that 'it is all one to be always
sensible of the same thing and not to be sensible of
anything.'"
Stallo next quotes the sentence from Mill cited above,
not mentioning that Mill is summarizing Hamilton. But the
invocation of Hobbes anchors the doctrine still more
firmly in the tradition of British thought.
What is original to Saussure, then, does not include
the view that linguistic meaning or any other form of
conceptual knowledge is generated purely by the
difference of one element from another within a system of
values. Nor, of course, does it include the idea that the
link between a linguistic meaning and the sounds which
signify it is arbitrary – that is an ancient
heritage. His novel contribution was to imagine the sound
side of language on the one hand, and the conceptual side
on the other, as perfectly alike in their nature and
mental operation. This is the “double essence”:
two orders of difference, held together by a force that
is essentially social, which he called the immutability
of linguistic signs. It makes it impossible for an
individual to introduce a change into the sign system,
and it means that any communal change creates a wholly
new system of values, which is to say a new language.
For if all consciousness is of difference, we can only
speak of “a language” where all differences
have been conventionalized, and are shared. Saussure
repeatedly testifies that on this point he was influenced
by the work of the American linguist William Dwight
Whitney, with whom he had a chance meeting while studying
in Germany in 1879. While he did not fully accept
Whitney's characterization of a language as an
“institution”, it set him on the track toward
his own modified view of its essentially social nature.
How the psychological link is made between the two
orders of difference is not addressed by Saussure. But he
became centrally involved when the question was taken up
in 1892 by his psychologist colleague Théodore Flournoy,
the most regular European correspondent, confidant and
intellectual soulmate of William James. In his review of
Flournoy’s book on “coloured hearing”
(also called synopsia or photism or, more generally,
synaesthesia), James underscores the vast range of
individual peculiarities discovered in the research.
“Sometimes”, James notes, “it makes a
difference how one imagines the sound to be written. The
photism, e.g., of French ou may differ from the
same individual’s photism of German u, though
the sounds are the same.” The individual James was
writing about – referred to by Flournoy as “the
eminent linguist Mr X” – was Saussure.
Photism, a word James himself was the first to use in
English, had been a popular subject in German and French
psychological research since the start of the 1880s. None
of the studies mentions the poem “Voyelles”,
written in 1871–2 by the young Rimbaud, even though
these psychologists were scholar-scientists who kept up
with literature. Of Flournoy’s 700 anonymous
subjects, Saussure was the only one to report that it
made a difference to him how a sound was written:
"In French we write the same vowel four different
ways in terrain, plein, matin, chien. Now when this vowel
is written ain, I see it in pale yellow like an
incompletely baked brick; when it is written ein,
it strikes me as a network of purplish veins; when it is
written in, I no longer know at all what colour
sensation it evokes in my mind, and am inclined to
believe that it evokes none.
When Saussure associates ain with an
incompletely baked brick, it is hard not to think of the
prototypical baked good, and one of the two most common
French words to contain ain. Although pain (bread)
is not mentioned, it too is a pale yellow when
incompletely baked. When ein strikes him as a
network of veins, this time the word used to identify the
visual association is present – veines –
though while the letters ein are there, in this
word they are not pronounced with the vowel he is
discussing. If in evokes nothing, could that have to do
with in- being a negative prefix? Or with in being
the stressed vowel of his given name, Mongin, which he
never used? He continued:
"So it does not seem to be the vowel as such
– as it exists for the ear, that is – that
calls forth a certain corresponding visual sensation. On
the other hand, neither is it seeing a certain letter or
group of letters that calls forth this sensation. Rather
it is the vowel as it is contained in this written
expression, it is the imaginary being formed by this
first association of ideas which, through another
association, appears to me as endowed with a certain
consistency and a certain colour, sometimes also a
certain shape and a certain smell."
Terms such as association and sensation which Saussure
uses here figure prominently in the
“associationism” established by Mill’s
Scottish ally Alexander Bain. In the second half of the
nineteenth century it came to define “modern”
psychology in Britain, then in America and Continental
Europe, where opposing traditions were more firmly
rooted. Saussure deploys an associationist vocabulary in
a casual and comfortable way that suggests no deep study
of the subject, but rather a familiarity acquired from
articles addressed to the general public and discussions
in the salon. These are the likely sources of the echoes
of Hippolyte Taine, a popularizer of associationism in
France, that Hans Aarsleff was the first to spot in
Saussure.
Saussure makes no pretence of analysing his own
reactions psychologically. He just records them, in
exquisite detail. The French letter-sound a he
experiences as
"off-white, approaching yellow; in its
consistency, it is something solid, but thin, that cracks
easily if struck, for example a sheet of paper (yellowed
with age) drawn tight in a frame, a flimsy door (in
unvarnished wood left white) that you feel would shatter
at the slightest blow, an already broken eggshell that
you can keep cracking by pressing on it with your
fingers. Better still: the shell of a raw egg is a
(whether in colour or in the consistency of the object),
but the shell of a hard-boiled egg is not a,
because of the feeling you have that the object is
compact and resistant. A yellowed pane of glass is a;
a pane of ordinary colour, offering blueish reflections,
is the very opposite of a, because of its colour,
and despite its consistency being just right."
Flournoy’s analytical commentary states the
principle of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign
that will generally be credited to Saussure’s later
lectures, though again its antiquity is well known:
"The word is arbitrary, conventional, and gets
attached to the idea only through the direct but purely
superficial and (if I may use the term) cortical link
that repetition ends up creating between the
corresponding centres or plexuses; the connection of the
sign and the thing signified is artificial and results
from habitual association. On the other hand the
relationship of photism to the auditory phenomenon is
natural, being essentially founded on . . . the identical
psychological effects that they have in the depths of the
organism."
Flournoy’s detailed terminology of cortical links
and plexuses will never be taken up by Saussure, nor will
the notion of repetition or habit creating links. He was
scrupulous about sticking to purely linguistic matters,
his expertise being philological rather than
psychological. Still, the overlap with the Jamesian
Flournoy is unmistakable. The two men remained close,
Flournoy turning to Saussure to analyse the
“Sanskritoid” utterances of the medium Hélène
Smith, made world-famous in Flournoy’s From India to
the Planet Mars (1900). Saussure’s son Raymond
studied under Flournoy and married his daughter, Ariane,
before going on to become a disciple of Freud.
What seems most disharmonious with Saussure’s
later views is the status he accords here to the written
sign. No hint of the “tyranny of the letter”,
of the visual image of a sound leading to “vicious
pronunciations” that are “pathological”
– all those overstatements so brilliantly
deconstructed by Derrida, but actually all from the pen,
not of Saussure, but of Bally and Sechehaye, editors of
the Course in General Linguistics. Saussure did make
remarks, in his third course, about spelling
pronunciations being tératologiques,
“anomalous”, even “monstrous”,
suggesting that it is unnatural for the visual image of a
sound to affect the spoken image, which it is its
function to represent passively. In his synaesthesia, the
two images seem much more equal, neither outweighing the
other in its contribution to the imaginary being that
evokes synaesthetic sensations.
No one becomes as famous as Saussure did without both
admirers and detractors reducing them to a
paragraph’s worth of ideas that can be readily
quoted, debated, memorized and examined. Those ideas then
become “Saussure”, while the human being, in
all his complexity, disappears. But Saussure was a man
who lived a life of contradictions, as we all do, he
perhaps more than most. At seventeen, he had heard his
neoclassical poetry publicly proclaimed by his teacher
John Braillard, normally a brutal critic, to be superior
to that of Jacques Delille, “the French
Virgil”, an immortal of the Académie Française.
After that, Saussure never wrote another line of verse,
apart from amusing party pieces, though he never lost his
poet’s instincts for language.
The best of his poems is “Le Feu sous la
cendre” (The fire beneath the ashes), the portrait
of a Huguenot family of the sixteenth century:
“Seuls on voit éclairés d’une rouge lueur /
Le père et ses deux fils devant la cheminée”
(Alone are seen, illumined by a red glow / The father and
his two sons before the fire). Something, we are not told
what, is troubling the old man. As he and his sons look
into the fire they have frightful premonitions, and hear
anguished sighs reminiscent of Dante’s Hell:
Et les voilà tous trois, rêveurs et sérieux
Cherchant dans ce chaos un sens mystérieux
Et si le destin sombre aussi leur fait attendre
Quelque vague malheur qui couve sous la
cendre.
(And there are the three of them, rapt in sombre
thought, / Searching the chaos for a mysterious meaning /
And whether dark destiny also has in store for them /
Some vague misfortune smouldering beneath the ashes.)
It is the one poem in which Saussure holds something
back – a mysterious meaning that smoulders beneath
the text. His other verses start from a transparent
image, or event, or sentiment, and strive for literary
effect on the surface, in rhythm, rhyme and the
occasional syntactic affectation.
The family portrayed is undoubtedly Saussure’s
own. In his veins ran the Calvinist doctrine that one
must express ideas
clearly and directly. Any revelling in the beauty of
language would be doubly frowned upon, both because it
was pleasurable and because it must stand in the way of
clear expression. Saussure’s poetic nature provides
an insight into his synaesthesia, his fascination with
anagrams and his belief in a structure lurking within the
chaos. His Calvinism helps us to understand the lucidity
of his lectures, achieved with enormous personal effort,
but also his inability to commit his conceptions of
language to paper in a form that met the superhuman
demands he imposed on himself.
For someone who believed that opposition and
difference were fundamental to language, he was entirely
blasé about the contradictions in his own life. A
Genevan through and through, a sergeant in the Swiss
militia, his earliest years were spent growing up on a
farm, not in Switzerland, but in France. He had Prussian
citizenship, because his mother’s family were from
Neuchâtel, which belonged to Prussia until 1857, the
year of his birth. But French was the Saussures’
language, and Ferdinand never felt at home speaking the
German he learned at the boarding school where all those
deplorable things occurred. And let us not forget, for he
himself has said it, and it is greatly to his credit,
that he was an Englishman. Burke’s Peerage shows
that Ferdinand de Saussure, the poet who could smell
vowels, was a tenth cousin (twice removed) of Princess
Diana. In some parallel universe, that surely signifies
something.
John E. Joseph is Professor of Applied Linguistics
in the University of Edinburgh. His recent books include
Language and Identity: National, ethnic, religious, 2004,
and Language and Politics, published last year.
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